London: strictly embargoed until: 7.30 am UK time on 11 March 2013 – Progenitor Labs Ltd (Progenitor) has announced that it has raised £4 million ($5.8 million) in seed financing from SR One’s UK Fund.

Progenitor is a pioneering regenerative medicine company that develops drugs to regenerate specific tissues of the human body in response to injury, disease or ageing. Development of small molecules in regenerative medicine has potential technical, commercial and regulatory advantages over cell therapies. The financing will enable the company to discover small molecule drugs for a number of serious diseases.

Progenitor uses CombiCult? combinatorial stem cell technology to produce synthetic adult progenitor cells that resemble those lying dormant in a patient’s target tissue. Pharmaceutical drug screens can then be performed to discover compounds that instruct the progenitor cells to generate terminally differentiated cells, thereby restoring organ function. Whereas most currently available drugs treat the symptoms of illness, drugs that regenerate diseased organs will address the root cause of disease.

Progenitor will be based at Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst (SBC), the UK' s first open innovation bioscience campus. Concurrent with the financing, Progenitor has also entered into an agreement with Scinovo™, GSK’s scientific consultancy and technical support model, which includes access to GSK scientists with a proven track record of bringing compounds from discovery through to launch.

Dr Yen Choo, founder and CEO of Progenitor Labs commented, “We are delighted to have attracted top tier venture financing and to have put in place an R&D infrastructure capable of delivering drugs that have the potential to transform regenerative medicine and future healthcare”.

David Phillips and Matthew Foy, Partners at SR One, will join Progenitor’s Board of Directors. David Phillips commented “We believe that Progenitor’s ground-breaking technology, combined with SBC’s open innovation model and drug discovery and development expertise of GSK’s Scinovo™, is a paradigm for future UK biotech success stories”.

Dr Martino Picardo, CEO of SBC, said, "We are delighted that Progenitor will be based at Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst, to seed the network of regenerative medicine activity we are developing here."

For more information, please contact:

Progenitor Labs

Dr Yen Choo, CEO

+44 (0) 203 598 2256

For media enquiries, Tristan Jervis, Managing Partner, De Facto

tel: +44 (0)207 203 6740 or e-mail: t.jervis@defacto.com.

About Progenitor Labs

Progenitor is a pioneering regenerative medicine company that develops drugs to regenerate specific tissues of the human body in response to injury, disease or aging. The company's scientists are experienced stem cell biologists and drug hunters, recruited from the world’s leading stem cell research institutes. They use award-winning combinatorial technologies developed specifically for stem cell research, to perform very large numbers of experiments in parallel. The company is focusing initially on three therapeutic programmes, to address serious diseases that affect millions of patients worldwide.